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Private Ownership and the Emergence of Field-based Agriculture

Quick update: There is a nicer, fancier article on this very subject on another blog. If for some reason you read my article below, treat yourself and partake of properal's piece too.

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There is a paper by Samuel Bowles and Jung-Kyoo Choi called 'Coevolution of farming and private property during the early Holocene' and it is wonderful. It leaves a few stones unturned and its thesis needs to be empirically verified or falsified but it really begins to clarify the intimate relationship between the form of agriculture that we refer to as farming on the one hand and private ownership on the other.

Their thesis is that technology was not the driver that led to long-term (inter-generational) farming, but also that farming did not follow some moment where the folks in a society all said "hey, let's all have private property now!" Rather, what they posit is that farming and private property actually coalesced, ad-hoc and over a multi-generational time-frame, around each other. Thought experiment to follow later.

The importance of institutional frameworks in determining whether or not new practices are taken up is roundly attested in the literature. This also invalidates historical materialism, but that's for another day. The point here is that people do not automatically adopt a technology or a practice just cos they have encountered it.

In many histories of technology, the key event is the invention; the subsequent spread occurs inexorably as the result of its superiority in lessening the toil required to sustain life. This model has been suggested for the Holocene revolution; but it does not work. No invention was necessary. Kent Flannery, who pioneered archaeological studies of the emergence of farming, observed that “we know of no human group on earth so primitive that they are ignorant of the connection between plants and the seeds from which they grow”

This means all human societies everywhere are at least technologically sophisticated enough to plant fields. So why don't they? The paper again;

Moreover, foraging and farming populations interacted over long periods in the Levant, India, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. In these cases, those who remained foragers surely knew about the new technology, as did foragers long before the initial spread of farming. In our simulations, as in the archaeological record, groups with substantial fractions of farmers coexist over long periods with groups engaged almost exclusively in foraging.

Cool simulation, right? Of course, it's not enough to be definitive. Treating this as proof that farming and private property grew side by side would be a mistake. But now the case that farming relies upon private property to emerge and become normalised is far more authoritative than any alternative. Let's not go so far as to say that the paper and the other two Santa Fe Institute papers linked below are literally correct.

Let us simply imagine people experimenting amidst their larger societies with crop cultivation. Such experiments last a generation or two and are abandoned when the experimenters die, then someone else tries for a generation or two and gives up, then someone suggests that others respect their 'right' to the land they're cultivating. Those others say no. Nothing violent or brutal necessarily happens. The idea just doesn't catch on. But let's imagine that that scenario plays out multiple times and somewhere, at some time, the folks in a given society who ain't cultivating yet are actually won over and join in, either as farmers themselves or in escalations of the existing division of labour.

Do read the links in the order in which they appear please. Finding the right comments in the third link might be quite interesting. They are all by a user called BestTrousers and start with "RI" meaning R1.

The main argument used by HealthcareEconomist3 is to give a survey of several works, while BestTrousers goes for comparative advantage.

Hopefully you good folks can indulge me by forgiving this post. It is an unfinished mess because I wanted it out there as the anchor for a hyperlink from a Reddit thread.At the momebt everything below is a jumble of notes, but I will be reworking it bit by bit starting today.Hopefully this post will be sorted out and typed in full before the end of April 2017.

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Historical materialism is the idea that history progresses in stages - slavery, then feudalism, then capitalism, then socialism, then communism - driven by changes in the technologies or techniques of production, and that any human civilisation will exemplify this process.

This makes historical materialism an exercise in both historicism and materialism.

Historicism is the idea that studying the past can reveal history's in-built course or narrative, and so show you the future.

Materialism is the idea that ideas ( and institutions) ultimately* don't matter in determining our destinies, and that therefore only material…

The idea that labor exploits capital is equally as plausible, sans assumptions*, as the idea that capital exploits labor. This is only intended as a response to the formal concept, descriptive or normative, of exploitation in Marx's schema from Capital Volume I.

* Assumptions include the power relation whereby capital is just assumed to be above labor hierarchically.

~ ~ Capital exploits labor because...
... Capital earns income from production done by labor that capital didn't perform
& ~ Labor exploits Capital because...
... Labor earns income from capital that labor didn't buy~
Basically in good old formal logic fashion both of those cases above, being factual descriptions, are true at once or are false at once.